The Ghost of Mary Prairie

Two

Mikey said he found me the next morning passed out on his front porch with my shirt all grimy and balled up under my head.

I didn't know how I got there and didn't even recognize Mikey at first. But I wanted to bend down and kiss the weathered-beaten slats under my head. I heard him ask his mother if we could have breakfast in the treehouse. We kept a box of Captain Crunch in there along with spoons, knives, and a loaf of bread and peanut butter for midnight snacks. Half the time, Mrs. Savage let us sleep out there, except for a month or so after she caught Mikey smoking his brother's cigarettes. He carried a bottle of milk in both hands and motioned for me to follow him. It was the only morning I can remember when I actually wanted a bath.

He poured fresh milk over mounds of the cereal in the same bowls we'd been using all summer. Anything we put in there now tasted funny, as the bowls had been embedded with the taste of sour milk. Mikey looked me up and down, sized me up good and started eating.

"Aren't you gonna ask me what I'm doing here?" I said.

He just shrugged. "It's summer, man. What do you think? You come over here every day."

"Not that. I mean today? After last night??" I was yelling now. I felt like I'd slept for all of ten minutes.

He just stared at me like he didn't know what I was talking about. And maybe he didn't.

"I saw a girl out there," I whispered.

The edges of his mouth cracked slightly up.

"A dead girl, or close to it."

"You don't say?" Mikey chomped hungrily at the cereal and sour milk.

I pulled the bowl away from him spilling globs of milk on the edge of the mattress. "I'm telling you that I saw a dying girl out on that prairie last night. With my own eyes."

"What'd she look like?"

And when he asked, in his typical uncaring way, I had a feeling he was thinking about her bra size or whether her face was pretty or not. I conjured the image back up in the mind and looked away from Mikey's sneer. "She had long, dark hair, small brown eyes and a cloth was wrapped over her mouth and her hands were tired behind her back. She was on some old blanket and there was blood on it, though I didn't see where exactly. Just looked like blood." I looked at Mikey's bowl of cereal and almost threw up right on it. I tried to get my stomach to stay calm and my mind to focus, but then I found myself leaning my head out of the treehouse, with clear strings of bile and gastric fluid hitting the rungs in the ladder and then landing on the soft dirt below. Mikey was looking at his cereal like it was a pile of maggots when I sat up again.

"Don't even pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. You sent me out there. You knew, didn't you? You've been out there. Who was she? Who did it to you? One of your older brothers? And where is she now? I went back out there but there was no sign of her." I sighed and caught my breath. I was almost crying. "Maybe I belong in one of those institutions."

Mikey looked down as if he'd been caught. "I been out there."

"Who sent you?" I asked, knowing this detail would largely determine the outcome of his experience.

"Blackie," he said under his breath.

Blackie was Mikey's oldest brother. "Man," I said with both sympathy and admiration. "You must've had to spend six days out there alone."

His eyes stared straight ahead. "Let's just say I'm not scared of nothing now."

Neither of us spoke for a while, and I was sure we were both thinking the same thing. That sound, that woman. Could I have imagined it? I saw on Mikey's face that I hadn't. He'd seen the same thing, or heard it anyway. Was she real? I thought of asking him, but decided he'd tell me when he was ready.

"Her name's Mary," he said after he finished eating, "and she sure as hell didn't die last night." His hands were fumbling with the hem on his shirt. It was too long for him, a hand-me-down. With five brothers, Mikey never had new clothes. Neither did I.

"So she's all right, then?" I asked with the naivety of someone who's seen something they shouldn't. I remembered Mama, then, and Daddy, Denny, and felt the strongest urge to run home and see if they'd all come back yet.

He chuckled. "If dead is all right, then yeah. She's long dead and gone now, but she lived here once in Grady, near your ranch come to think of it."

I tried to comprehend this impossible scenario. "What happened to her?" I asked.

Mikey sipped the milk right out of the bottle and then handed it to me. He shrugged. "Guess somebody killed her or something."

"You guess?" I asked, incensed by his lack of information. "You mean you don't know? Who told you about her?"

He shrugged. "Everyone knows about her."

"Who?"

He gave me the idiot look. "Ma-ry! She died out on that prairie just like you were out there last night. All alone and she couldn't get up and even call for help. Somebody gagged her, tied her hands behind her back and beat her up so bad she couldn't move. That's why they say she screams like that all night. She couldn't scream when she was alive so now she haunts the whole prairie calling out for her killer to return."

I felt a current zigzag up and down my spine. "So what the hell did I see and hear last night???"

"Same thing everybody's seen. Her ghost."

All the blood drained from my face and the 4' x 3' tree house felt like a meat locker.

"Would she kill the man who killed her?"

Mikey shrugged like he'd told the story a thousand times already. "How should I know? She is dead, you know. Dead people can't kill the living. That's what I heard."

"So why's she looking for her killer then?" I asked, begging for some additional detail to help me comprehend this odd new story.

Mikey sighed and that's when I knew I wouldn't get another word out of him about her. "Ask your sister."

"Lewella? Why?"

"It's her boyfriend's dairy farm that it all happened on."

Now I was confused. I told him Denny's farm was nowhere near the baseball diamond.

Mikey shook his head back and forth and grinned deeply. "But they used to live on Happy Jack Road and owned that plot of land before it got converted to a baseball field."

I ran all the way home in bare feet on the dirt path and made it in close to twenty minutes. By the time I got there no air would fit in my lungs. Doc Fisher was pacing on the front porch with a glass of yellow liquid in one hand and a cigar in the other.

"Where've you been, boy? Gave your mama a near heart attack. She's had enough of those lately."

I looked up into his bleary, blue eyes and knew something bad had happened, maybe last night, maybe at the same time that the baseball diamond witch was haunting me. "Where's Lewella?" I asked in a small voice, terrified of the answer.

He shook his head. "Weak. Don't know nothing yet about that baby neither."

"It's not mature yet?" I asked, and the Doc couldn't help but laugh.

"Pre-mature, you mean. It came a month too early and your sister nearly died in the process."

I didn't know if I was more afraid to look at her than go back to that baseball diamond. It was a toss up. I heard Mama's voice in the house.

"Jacob?"

I was too scared to move.

"Jacob Leeds. Come on in here this minute."

I stood on the porch with my nose on the screen door. I could see everything, but felt somehow insulated from the unmistakable smell of childbirth, as I remembered from Lewella's last baby.

"I thought you all moved away and left me here," I said in a voice that I knew would gain sympathy from the only person I ever knew who could properly give it. "So I did the chores and slept in the treehouse with Mikey." It was the first of what I knew would be many lies to come.

"Come inside," she enunciated clearly as if I hadn't heard the first time. But I'd heard her all right. I opened the screen and slid in through the crack. Lewella's big, rosy-cheeked face looked like the color of milk now. Her eyes looked like they'd been dipped in red paint and lacquer and the lashes were matted down with tears. Her hair was wet and brushed off her forehead. I could tell she was barely breathing.

"Do you want me to get you anything, Mama?" I asked.

She shook her head and wiped fresh tears from her eyes. "Say a prayer and light a candle at the church next time you go."

Church? Did she actually think I went to church voluntarily? I had sort of assumed she knew Mikey and me played kickball in the schoolyard during mass, like all boys our age did. But now I had to go, didn't I? Damn.

I found Denny Simms out by the barn brushing Lewella's horse. He looked so small and pathetic with his head down and back hunched over. I would have felt sorry for him, if it wasn't for the fact that his poison seed had brought nearly two dead babies and more misery into my family. Not that misery was anything new to rural Oklahoma, or new to America even. I was born during the Second World War and we'd already been in another one since then. From outside the barn doors, I could see Denny weeping and brushing his tears into the horse's mane.

I knew it was serious when I saw Doc drinking scotch out on the front porch. In my heart I was terrified for all of them, all of us. But my head was longing for answers to all my questions about the baseball diamond. Out of respect, I thought I should announce my presence.

"Hey Den? It's Jake. Can I come in?"

Denny sniffed and wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeves. "Where you been all night?"

"In the treehouse," I lied for the second time. "How about you? I came back for supper and everyone'd gone."

"Doc Fisher said Lewella had to try to have the baby in a hospital. So we drove out to Wichita Falls and got there after dark. Don't know how she held out that long but they had to have two doctors cut the baby out of her stomach."

I didn't know how to tell him how badly I didn't want to hear the rest. "She's okay now?" I asked.

Denny sniffed again. "Baby was turned backwards and Doc Fisher couldn't fix it. Lewella's taking medicine for the infection and the baby's still in Wichita Falls till it gets strong enough to come home," he explained.

I had closed my eyes.

"Only reason why Lewella's home now's cause I begged Doc. I knew only your Ma could make her well again. God knows I only make things worse for everyone."

"Don't say that, Denny. Lewella knows it's not your fault and she'll tell you herself soon as she can talk again." I was feeling charitable. Besides, I needed something from him. So maybe it wasn't charity at all.

"I got a job at the lumber yard last week," Denny said continuing to brush the horse with his back toward me. "Today would've been my first day."

Well there was no consoling him now. I might as well jump in, I thought. "How long's your family been at your ranch, Den?"

He either didn't hear me or was pretending he didn't. "Soon as I get that job and some money coming in, I'm gonna have Lewella a big wedding in a church like she wanted." He turned around now. "It's been so long since I done anything right, I think I might have forgot how."

"You'll do fine in that lumberyard," I said. "You got good hands for carpentry. Daddy says so."

He almost smiled at that.

It was now or never. "So how about your ranch?" I tried again.

Denny looked up. "What's that now?"

"Your family been there long?"

He tilted his head back and the sun lit up his swollen, red face. "Since about 1920. Before that a preacher and his wife owned it. It belonged to the family of the preacher's wife for near a hundred years."

"They have any slaves?"

He chuckled. "Not this far west, no. It wasn't no farm back then either. A cattle ranch. A big one's I understand it."

"Ever heard of anyone named Mary on that ranch?" I asked after a long pause.

Denny looked down and had a secret on his lips. "You don't mean Mary Prairie?" Now he laughed out loud. "I had a feeling you didn't sleep in no treehouse last night."

I began inspecting my fingernails.

"Where'd you hear that old legend?" Denny asked.

"Nowhere. I was just curious is all. Everybody's heard of her. Everybody who lives in Grady, that is."

"I don't know much about it, other than some girl died out there in the pasture after getting beat up real bad."

I pulled out an imaginary shovel. "Anyone else know about it, maybe?"

"Walter van Geller, I reckon. He's the son of the preacher who owned that land."

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